If you're the government's new social mobility tsar and you have spent your first media interview arguing that parents shouldn't give their offspring a helping hand in the workplace, it's probably advisable you don't employ one of your daughters.

That is the situation facing James Caan, the finance entrepreneur and former Dragons Den panellist, a vocal critic of familial nepotism who has embarrassed Nick Clegg, the person who appointed him, by seemingly not practising what he preaches. Perhaps inevitably, Caan defended himself by insisting his daughters got their jobs purely on merit.

The 52-year-old Pakistan-born businessman warned off the dangers of helping out one's children too readily. Speaking to the Daily Telegraph, Caan said it was important to "let the child stand on his own two feet" and not assist them finding a job until "the child has tried everything". He explained: "You are trying to develop your child too; you don't want them to feel as though they don't have to make the effort."

Caan outlined a wider point: "Our job as a society is to make people aware of the consequences of some of the things that we do and the underlying messages that sometimes we send out by some of the actions that we take."

Inevitably, it did not take long for Caan's own underlying message to emerge, principally through the business networking website Linkedin. A profile for Caan's younger daughter, Hanah, explains how the 25-year-old began working for him almost immediately after leaving university and has no fewer than three roles within his business and charitable empire.

It also transpired that his elder daughter, Jemma, now works for a recruitment company in which Caan invests, though that came after four years of post-university work elsewhere.

Hanah Caan's Linkedin profile explains how she has worked as an "adviser" for Hamilton Bradshaw, her father's Mayfair-based private equity vehicle, since August 2009, straight after the end of her business statistics BSc at the London School of Economics. In 2010, she became a trustee of the James Caan Foundation, his charitable enterprise, before in 2012 also taking on an advisory role at the Start-up Loans Company, a government-backed organisation chaired by her father.

In a statement on his website, Caan insisted he believed parents should "encourage their children to explore their own opportunities and define themselves in their own right". He added: "The fact is that parents will always have the innate feeling to help their children into jobs. I'm no different."

In the case of Jemma, Caan said, she "spent four years of pursuing many jobs to establish herself on her own career path" before, six months ago, she joined the company in which he invests. He added: "Despite my involvement she still had to go through a rigorous recruitment process with a number of different candidates and demonstrate her own abilities."In the case of Hanah, he explained, she "volunteered" for Hamilton Bradshaw after university before submitting her CV and being interviewed for a graduate internship position.

He said: As somebody who is highly experienced in the recruitment sector, I wanted her to understand the challenges of securing a role like any other applicant. At the same time we also interviewed another graduate who submitted their application through the website and they have progressed within the business to management level. Both candidates applied for jobs and submitted a CV and applied for the role using the same recruitment process."